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Originally Posted by DTickler
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This is fascinating. The first part is dry reading, but you get to the middle of the paper and it reads like a novel. Maybe the Andromeda Strain would be a good analogy. Thanks for posting this Tickler.
The authors came across an old Chinese masters thesis, written in 2013, that described six workers who came down with a deadly disease in a mine inhabited by bats. Three of the six died after illnesses. Bat coronaviruses were isolated from the mine. One included a genome sequence, BtCoV/4991, 98.7% identical to SARS-CoV-2, and the other, RaTG13 was 96.2% identical.
The workers had inhaled fumes from the bat guano, deeply. Most cases of Covid 19 are in the upper respiratory tract, but these guys, exposed to high quantities of the virus, ended up with infections in the lower lungs. The authors say that the lower lungs contain 4500 times as much tissue through which the virus can spread than the upper respiratory tract. So what happened was that the virus evolved rapidly, as it spread through the lungs, perhaps compressing 20 to 50 years of evolution into months. So it's very possible one or more of these miners ended up with a virus identical to or very similar to Covid 19. This is the theory the authors favor, although they reference another theory that hypothesizes the virus has been around for years in humans, unrecognized, and evolved during that time before taking off and becoming a pandemic.
The writers believe it's very possible the Wuhan laboratory obtained a sample of the virus that infected the miners, and while studying it one of the researchers became infected. And then the rest would be history.
The Wuhan laboratory has blamed the deaths of the workers on a fungal infection, like histoplasmosis. This is suspicious because other papers (not the masters thesis) written on this incident point towards a coronavirus as more likely responsible for the deaths. These guys did go a long time though before they died, months in a couple of instances, which seems atypical of Covid 19. But on the other hand the mortality rate from people who are sick with histoplasmosis is a lot lower than 50%.
While they don't say it, they, like other experts in coronaviruses, would would believe the idea the Chinese developed Covid 19 as a weapon is ridiculous.
I never could figure out btw why supposedly you get sicker if you're exposed to a larger quantity of the virus. This paper impressed on me why.
